A Synergistic Approach to Process Innovation

With the continuing globalisation of the economy comes increasing number of competitors. Consequently, products lifecycles has continued to fall as companies strive to out-manoeuvre one another by introducing product and service innovations to meet the needs of increasingly choosy customers. This has created a business environment where change has become widespread and persistent. As processes are the engines that power organisations to deliver the values required by customers, it becomes imperative that to have competitive edge, or even survive in this sort of business environment, these processes need to be not only adaptable to the changes but also be capable of inducing the changes that would benefit the organisations. To investigate the feasibility of adaptable and change inducing processes, the research presented in this paper explores the synergies amongst three techniques for problems solving and process improvement: Theory of Inventive Problem Solving, which is more commonly known by its Russian acronym, TRIZ; Theory of Constraints (TOC); and Lean Manufacturing.